Reviews Archive
Mildred's Lane
18 June - 6 September 2008
Alexander Gray Associates - 526 West 26 Street #1019
Most refrigerators are dumps. Leftovers from a midnight binge spoil in the back. That overpriced entrée you didn't really enjoy but couldn't bear to throw away because you squandered so much on it lingers. Isn't it ironic how most fridges end up collecting old food that we would rather not eat?
Then, there is cleaning out the refrigerator…. Few tasks could be more Sisyphean.
J. Morgan Puett claims the refrigerator as a site of subtle beauty from within these decadent, first-world horrors of the the 21st century. She honed her ability to find the art within a refrigerator during her stint as the ringleader of the Mildred's Lane art colony in rural Pennsylvania. That colony's output is the subject of Alexander Gray's summer group show, where one can find one of Morgan's fascinating fridges on view.
Surfactant - A Group Survey
Rupert Ravens Contemporary
85 Market Street, Second Floor, Newark, NJ
In Surfactant, as 17 artists chart immanent relationships amidst a stratum of novel material, surface tension waxes and wanes (a surfactant is a substance that reduces the surface tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved). In the midst of mining obfuscated properties embedded in the art terrain, the viewer is propelled into an intensive dialogue with the historical and metaphorical qualities of each of these works. Capped eloquently by Charles Baudelaire’s “On the Heroism of Modern Life” from Salon of 1846, “Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface,” therein divulging inner layers of the objects and installations presented.
With her triad of Asian-styled cylindrical structures, Gae Savannah takes on superficial fashion and “life of Girl.” These towering columns, housed in over-the-top fabric, embody the element of surprise. Topped with pagoda-like peaks, Savannah’s gangling tourelles contain tiny enclosures mimicking mini-boudoirs whose seduction is ultimately subverted by their reduced scale and inaccessibility. In Lu Shia, a plastic shower curtain wraps around its conical understructure while abbreviated details, such as a piece of lavish, quasi-fluorescent fabric, drape and tuck around an interior space like shining satin found in draperies in an Old Master painting, gone “Girl.” With combined references to the oriental and occidental, the ritualistic wrapping of fabric functions both inside and outside the structures, layering the work with cultural and metaphorical meaning. Not content to arouse the viewer with mere self-referentiality, these three regal beauties, in all their gleaming glitterati, strike a pose on a fictitious pop culture runway.
From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art
May 1 - August 15, 2008
Scandinavia House - 58 Park Avenue
Initially, the most noticeable works at the gallery at Scandinavia House are the pieces comprising Haul. Five tiny models scattered around the floor envision lightly populated landscapes; viewed from above, the sculptures give visitors the effect of the ground viewed from an airplane window. Referencing the artist’s own tendency to move around the world, the landscapes are built within cargo crates sized to fit them; the crates themselves look haphazardly opened and ready to be packed back up at any moment. Their creator, Katrín Sigurðardóttir, is from Iceland, as are all the artists featured in From Another Shore – studies have brought her to San Francisco and New Jersey, and in that way she exemplifies a part of the premise behind the organization of the show.
The State Itself Becomes A Super Whatnot
Liam Gillick
Casey Caplan - 525 West 21st Street New York, NY
8 May 8 - 14 June 2008
Recent economic and political crises, such as the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, have called attention to the problematic position of the nation state in contemporary global culture. The current American recession, whose genesis lies in the unprecedented growth of liquid capital in the global marketplace, and a complex series of obscure banking and investment strategies, has ended with United States government propping up investment capital, such as Bear-Sterns, in an effort to avoid a projected global meltdown. The oft-repeated explanation was that Bear-Sterns was "too big to fail." That is, its connections with the global marketplace ran so deep that a collapse of the company would set off a domino effect, wreaking worldwide financial havoc. The government must therefore protect this corporate citizen, or risk endangering its own position of power. The penetration of global capital into the apparatus of the state leads one to ask whether or not it is the tail that wags the dog. Liam Gillick raises some of these issues with The State Itself Becomes A Super Whatnot, his new solo show at Casey Kaplan Gallery. Gillick has made a career of repurposing minimalism and conceptualism into neatly designed objects embedded in complex theoretical narratives that are dispersed through the artist's prolific writings, performances, and talks.
His biggest formal debt is perhaps owed to Donald Judd, whose works Gillick’s on view here most resemble, and whose overbearing critical practice is evoked by Gillick’s complex theoretical interpretations of his own work. Unlike Judd’s criticism, which was always intended as supplemental to what he considered his actual artistic production, Gillick’s critical and theoretical writing is an essential element of his artistic practice. In blurring the lines between artistic production and the disinterested gaze of the cultural critic he reveals that the motivations and strategies of the critic are as much an act of creative agency as that of the artist himself.
To that end, he has created the long running potential, or unwritten, text, Construcción de Uno. This unwritten text never completely reveals the artist’s intentions, but positions a hermeneutics whose unquantifiability acts as a buffer for those critics who would seek to reduce the artist’s practice to their own terms. He has revealed a few details about this text, however: one of the principle scenarios of the text, whose narrative frames this exhibition, follows the former workers of an experimental Volvo manufacturing plant located in Brazil who return to the workplace after it has been decommissioned by Ford. There they spend their time producing elegant theories on labor equivalence and begin to refashion the site as a testing ground for new models of production.
Laura Paulini's work, along with that of Derrick Melander Penelope Umbrico, was recently on view at Repetti Gallery in Long Island City.
Laura Paulini paints with her lucky chopstick. It's a cheap wooden one that she that found with a meal. Yet, the artist soon discovered that when she dipped this particular stick in tempera paint and then dabbed her birch picture planes, the dot turned out chillingly perfect. There is just something magical about the tip's shape and how it holds paint. Paulini theorizes that after many sessions of use the stick has not worn but actually calibrated to her technique. The artist has likewise honed her skill to the qualities of this chopstick. The utensil is so valuable that Paulini was tormented recently over bringing the stick along on her next residency or avoiding the risk of loss and leaving it at the studio. This modest but powerful tool looms behind each of her paintings.
Dot by dot, row by row, column by column, Paulini creates geometric Op Art patterns with a pointillist style. From a distance the Tron-like grid is clear but as a viewer approaches the field dissolves into a series of well placed dots. This game of distance and watching the image modulate with each step is one trademark of good pointillism that her works display with flying colors.
It has now been eighty-nine years since Mondrian's first grid paintings in Paris. The rigidly organized field still manages to touch a nerve on the retina. Let's forgo the predictable arguments over Rosalind Krauss's essays and appreciate the grid's tenacity when so many elements of modern painting now fall flat. The grid is like the friend you still call even though you've spent evenings cataloging his or her flaws. The grid is that dish that your mother never aces, but prepares with that bizarre twist that is her enduring signature. Paulini's work draws upon the grid's bittersweet stamina as recent painting stands between the hard rock of modernism and the harder place of what comes after.
Street Language
Darkcloud & Matt Siren
Woodward Gallery - 133 Eldridge Street New York, NY
May 10 - June 28, 2008
Sign Language
Woodward Gallery - 133 Eldridge Street New York, NY
May 10 - June 28, 2008
The two simultaneous shows at the Lower East Side's Woodward Gallery are a complicated affair. One tagged — pardon the pun — as Street Language is by two prominent New York street artists, Matt Siren and Darkcloud. The other, titled Sign language, greets visitors to the gallery before they proceed to the larger two-person show.
"Sign Language" is comprised of small metal signs created by a dream list of street art brands, including Phalllic Memory, Celso, Vor138, Keely, Deo, xinagrafx, AVone and 2esae. These "Untitled" mash-ups juggle various styles (or brands) to produce exciting, fun and engaging panels. When Matt Siren layers his thick lines over top of The Lovely Brenda's pin up girls, there's a dialogue — each panel is like a paragraph in a larger story. The street artists vie for attention like advertisers in the city.
If the individual pieces are interesting, the show does little more than try to blatantly market aspects of a scene that doesn't really thrive in a petri dish (or a conventional art gallery). This exhibition highlights the continuing problem street art faces as it responds to growing popularity and its practitioners try to cash in on their burgeoning fame. The show does little to address the urban lexicon and some of its volatile energy.
The gallery press release tries hard to establish a relevance for what we're seeing: "Connected through the rapid waves of text messaging, blogs, and websites these urban artists are now able to connect internationally with their peers creating a shifting social network. Their organized approach to a self-guided movement, so prominent in user-generated wiki-culture, is mirrored in each artist’s unique attempt to edit the urban landscape."
The problem is that removed from the city, these sanctioned works don't edit as much as decorate. Robbed of their "natural" context they look design-y. That's not to say they aren't good, but their success is in spite of the gallery context. The works themselves are small and suffer from the choke hold of their diminutive size.
Actuellement : Regard Sur Mai 68: Photos, Musiques Et Voix
Alain Quemper
Dorothy's Gallery - 27 Rue Keller, Paris
11 April - 2 June 2008
The specter of May 1968 has been haunting us for forty years now, and it is time to put it to rest. This does not mean surrender, either to the rightist vision of a capitalism both benevolent and triumphant or to the reformist project of accommodation. Rather, it requires seeing this last gasp of revolution in the West for what it was: a failure as colossal in its implications as it was glorious in execution. "Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves," said the graffiti of the time, quoting Saint-Just. We — today's radicals — risk being buried alive in the grave May has dug for us.
For it was in fact a failure on many fronts. Not just in the obvious sense — the ensuing return of normalcy and a rightward electoral shift almost unprecedented in French history — but also in its successive reincarnations as a banner of the revolutionary left. The fact that May became a spectacularized image, a simulacrum, represents perhaps the greatest betrayal of its politics. Indeed, this is a central warning of Debord's Society of the Spectacle: the ideological image of the proletariat creates Bolshevism, while the ideological image of the revolutionary moment, the anarcho-syndicalist fantasy of the day of the general strike, cripples the capacity for real action. The fetishization of May does the anarchists one better. Rather than placing the magical moment of revolt in an always near but never achievable future, it relegates it to the dead and irretrievable time of the past. This facilitates the production and marketing of glossy, red-tinted souvenirs — from the works of Badiou to The Dreamers and the myriad wistful think-pieces in the left-wing dailies.
In fact, as « Regard sur mai 1968 » at Dorothy's Gallery in Paris suggests, there was never quite as total of a revolt as some imagine. The show exhibits a hundred (quite unremarkable) 1968 photographs by Alain Quemper. Of these, perhaps half a dozen depict the flag-waving revolutionary protesters we are used to seeing (and even these contain a fair number of bored or vaguely interested bystanders). Another dozen show scowling apparatchiks like Pompidou, angry at the unrest. But the rest — the overwhelming majority — show the smiling and content faces of the culture industry: actors, singers, athletes. They look as unruffled as they do in any other year; as students and workers made lofty speeches, the capitalist apparatus they represented continued blithely to chug on. In short, though the French government was briefly in danger, neither capitalism nor the State itself had anything to fear — it was a replay, not of 1789, but of 1830.
Market Forces Part I (of II): Consuming Territories
At Carriage Trade Gallery through Sunday, May 18th.
5 April - 18 May 2008
Note: Part two of this exhibition will be on view from 23 May - 9 June 2008.
Artist lofts. Think about that term for a second. When was the last time you saw an artist buy an artist loft apartment?
Walk down any block in New York, and you'll understand. No matter the developer or ad agency responsible, there it is on the scaffolding of another high rise: "Luxury artist lofts." Taking a moment to deliberate, one has to wonder if there is anything out there to purchase but luxury.
Just recently installed at Carriage Trade gallery in Soho, Market Forces Part I: Consuming Territories is a poignant commentary on how these words of commerce have been taken out of their historic confines and assigned radical new meaning. Today, artist lofts rarely house working artists, but are deliberately marketed to give the look and feel of bohemian grottoes. Add to it the redefinition of art itself – no longer a vessel of human creation or transference of beauty; there is nothing left to ponder, but only to possess. In the Market Forces exhibition, we're asked to consider if we are, or have ever been, truly free? This show serves as a cautionary tale of the present day voracious societal norm of living beyond one's means, and a harbinger of further devolution still to come.
With the completion of Manifest Destiny, growth has now turned inwards. An obliteration has occurred – yards, trees, sidewalks, being able to walk to school. Much of what was once commonplace in communities has forever vanished before our eyes. Take Alex MacLean's almost Google Earth-like aerial photographs of planned communities in various stages of development. Appearing almost like a crowded cookie sheet, or container of Marshmallow Peeps, each home is meticulously spaced just feet apart from the next. In the photo of Las Vegas, they look as if they're being built close enough for a resident to open a window and shake a neighbor's hand. An Orwellian story come to life, these planned communities give up any sense of uniqueness to the design of the home itself. There is no room for eccentricity, let alone individuality. At the same time, despite that these designs are carbon copies of each other, the cookie cutter offerings are nonetheless marketed to the buyer as "theirs to own." Viewing the desolate plots of desert land and cloned candy-shell roofs from above shows how hollow the promise rings. The continued notion of home ownership is incredibly deceitful, for no one is truly a homeowner unless they have paid every cent of the cost. MacLean is not only warning the viewer of a loss of self, but also highlights the downfall of a credit-based society lying dormant and complacent, sleeping in their 300-thread count sheets, happily sedated by their Lunesta, snoring away, all the while believing the lie. This photo in particular shows the harsh reality. The modern day lords of the land (the banks) are the real owners — a singular image of the new feudalism.
i've nothing to lose
nothing to gain
i'll kiss you in the rain
--from Blackout, David Bowie
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Alexander Gray Gallery - 526 West 26th Street #1019, New York NY
April 30 - June 14, 2008
At the reception for Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's transcendent show at Alexander Gray one of the guests kept prattling on about somebody they knew who knew David Bowie. Y'know, the typical overhear-me-please stuff that one sometimes hears at openings. But it was OK, because their random noise sent me in an appropriate direction: West Berlin, 1976.
Let me explain. I was climbing into the painting, Up, and thinking about all the ways it explores and exploits The Grid when my jabbering pals put The Thin White Duke into my head. In '76, when Bowie needed to get off the grid of a certain approach to song (and career) he went to West Berlin with Brian Eno to record two great albums, Low and "Heroes". The time signatures and melodies are never exactly where they should be, but somehow Bowie's escape from the grid makes the listener even more aware of it, not unlike the the Krautrock from which Bowie and Eno stole so liberally.
But I deviate. Obviously.
The New People Are Already Here
Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov
Deitch Projects - 76 Grand St, New York NY
Russia is a country of many contradictions. The rich live lavishly, adorned with Chanel and BMW SUVs that often come with a driver and a body guard. The poor, on the other hand, live in dire straits because the vestiges of a dead regime following the dissipation of the Soviet Union left them with nothing more than pathetic pensions that are not a far leap from Soviet bread lines and empty shelves in department stores. In fact, according to the Forbes list of the richest men in the world, number three, following Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, is the Russian mogul Roman Abramovich. Fine, he is actually number 11, but at the age of 39, his net worth is $18.2 billion. And yet the tight fists of the neo-dictators, who rule this multifarious and expansive land, seek to rid the country of criminal activity that has been so conducive to the "oligarch" status the wealthy men of business have acquired. The less fortunate masses view former president, now prime minister Putin's Czar-like persona with the same ambivalence that marks this nation; after all, while he has tacitly extinguished any potential opposing voices (read: killed off all the journalists who dare to speak any brazen truth), he has equally quelled the fires of mafia wars that raged in Russia through the 1990s. With business management and democratic politics under their belt, elite Russians have turned to art as the category of knowledge that can buy them a certain level of sophistication. In fact, Sotheby's recently shipped a collection of works to Bavrikha, a high end mall of sorts on the outskirts of Moscow, where the oligarchs buy their Gucci and their Fendi, and now, can browse the de Koonings, Hirsts and Warhols.
